Industrial Professional Articles

Edge computing is a trending topic in industrial production. Based on a definition of the term edge, this article describes the current status of technology and market developments in industrial edge computing.

As plants completes the digital transition, communication with process control systems is more and more important. HIMA's digitalization strategy for functional safety has prioritized offering the most popular industry-standard protocols for safety systems, and now includes PROFINET to handle distributed 1/0.

Ethernet-APL (Advanced Physical Layer) offers considerable benefits for end users in the process industry by facilitating seamless connectivity between field devices using the Ethernet protocol and greatly simplifying the creation of high-performance automation networks. Fast and safe implementation possible without having to build up extensive specialist knowledge about Ethernet-APL.

Industrial edge computing can mean data are processed locally and never leave the site, or data can be forwarded for processing to a central platform. Hybrid systems with a mix of local and centralized data processing are the most common model used in practice but the key is potential advantages and benefits.

Data transfer plays an especially important role in the integration of the production and management domains, with the large number of variables, heterogeneous interfaces, rights management, and specific security requirements being just some of the key challenges faced in this context. A middleware based on OPC UA offers a particularly elegant approach to implementation here.

IT architectures need to play a vital role in IIoT system architectures, with gateways evolving to provide more flexible, innovative and efficient software solutions. A key question is how network solutions can be deployed to exploit software, IT and innovative algorithms and make production more efficient.

With the help of Softing's FG-200 gateway, the field level is connected via Foundation Fieldbus with little effort.

The digital transformation in the manufacturing industry is increasingly high on the agenda. For it to work, the OT and IT level must be much more closely interlinked than before. This is not only a technical challenge. openautomation talked to Frank Steinhoff, Managing Director of Softing Industrial Automation GmbH, on this topic.

What is the difference between cloud and edge computing and how they can work together for the successful implementation of IIoT solutions?

Use of a gateway along with OPC UA and MQTT, can provide access to S7 controller machine tool data. This allows important spindle and axis data, such as torque and power consumption, to be read out, processed and become available for condition monitoring, predictive maintenance, and data logging or analysis tasks.